Bad Girls: Agency, Revenge, and Redemption in Contemporary Drama
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e Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy Bad Girls: Agency, Revenge, and Redemption in Contemporary Drama Courtney Watson, Ph.D. Radford University Roanoke, Virginia, United States [email protected] ABSTRACT Cultural movements including #TimesUp and #MeToo have contributed momentum to the demand for and development of smart, justified female criminal characters in contemporary television drama. These women are representations of shifting power dynamics, and they possess agency as they channel their desires and fury into success, redemption, and revenge. Building on works including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, dramas produced since 2016—including The Handmaid’s Tale, Ozark, and Killing Eve—have featured the rise of women who use rule-breaking, rebellion, and crime to enact positive change. Keywords: #TimesUp, #MeToo, crime, television, drama, power, Margaret Atwood, revenge, Gone Girl, Orange is the New Black, The Handmaid’s Tale, Ozark, Killing Eve Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy 37 Watson From the recent popularity of the anti-heroine in novels and films like Gone Girl to the treatment of complicit women and crime-as-rebellion in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale to the cultural watershed moments of the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements, there has been a groundswell of support for women seeking justice both within and outside the law. Behavior that once may have been dismissed as madness or instability—Beyoncé laughing wildly while swinging a baseball bat in her revenge-fantasy music video “Hold Up” in the wake of Jay-Z’s indiscretions comes to mind—can be examined with new understanding. Women are angry, and that anger is being mirrored and justified in popular culture. As British writer Sophie Heawood noted in 2014, “The older I get, the more I see how women are described as having gone mad, when what they’ve actually become is knowledgeable and powerful and fucking furious (Heawood).” Hold up, indeed. Contemporary narratives have not only made room for furious women in their stories, they’ve begun to celebrate them as empowered and justified agents for change. There has been an evolution in the trope of the bad girl; while she was once merely a jealous, petty, and vindictive trouble-maker—Nellie Olsen at any age— today’s bad girl is a woman with purpose who tends to be decidedly darker than her beloved male criminal counterpart: she’s smart, she’s ruthless, and she’s had it with laws and oppressive social conventions. Most importantly, she refuses to be quiet about it. The concept of the bad girl has evolved in the wake of recent cultural and political events: her genesis, her indiscretions, how she is punished—because women who break the rules are always punished, one way or another—and her fight for agency and redemption. An exploration of criminal (or, in some cases, arbitrarily criminalized) behavior perpetrated by women in The Handmaid’s Tale, Ozark, and Killing Eve offers compelling insight into shifting cultural desires and expectations. In a recent cultural landscape wherein Walter White was revered while his long-suffering wife was so vilified that the actress portraying her received death threats (Gunn), it is now worthwhile to examine the cultural influence of recent political movements and their continued impact on the characterization of criminal women in contemporary drama. GONE GIRL While there are many notable productions worthy of discussion, it is the success of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling 2012 novel Gone Girl, which was rapidly adapted into a 2014 film starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, that marked a cultural flashpoint for the treatment of women’s anger and criminal behavior in contemporary drama. The thriller centers around characters Nick and Amy Dunne—both abysmal—in the wake of Amy’s disappearance, which plays out in the bright glare of the 24-hour news cycle as Nick is tried in the court of public opinion. However, what at first appears to be a case of an unfaithful husband killing his inconvenient wife takes a sudden turn when it is revealed to Nick—and the reader—that Amy staged her own kidnapping as revenge for Nick’s indiscretions and other failures. While the plot is unpredictable, Amy’s anger is cold and constant; Amy is no heroine, but her justified fury strikes a chord with the audience. Gone Girl gained traction because it tapped into the outrage that would soon be expressed by the #TimesUp and #metoo movements. While the novel Gone Girl and its subsequent film adaptation received acclaim, there was one specific passage in the book that well-captures the ideas and undercurrent of anger that have defined the era of #metoo and #TimesUp. In a passage that went viral and spawned dozens of think pieces, Flynn captured the essence of a problematic, real-life female archetype that is diametrically opposed to women’s agency, shoring up the very patriarchy that oppresses her. Flynn calls her the Cool Girl: Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the 38 Volume 6, Issue 2 Agency, Revenge, and Redemption in Contemporary Drama world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. (Flynn 210) While Flynn directs no shortage of vitriol at men throughout her novel, she places blame for the illusion of the Cool Girl on women: “Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl…And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be” (Flynn 210). Flynn identifies these women, the wannabe Cool Girls, as being complicit in the perpetuation of what is ultimately a dangerously disempowering persona and she takes them to task for their disillusionment. As she is presented by Flynn, the Cool Girl is an unfortunate trend, a cultural curiosity whose harm is largely localized to herself. She is annoying to those who know that her performative coolness is just that, a show. She does not seem to be dangerous until her actions are examined on a larger scale and the misogyny inherent to her existence becomes apparent: “ [She] likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not a Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women’)” (Flynn 210). When examined beyond the individual and as a collective, the approval the Cool Girl seeks transforms into a desire with troubling implications, particularly when she becomes a voting bloc. When the Cool Girl evolves into the complicit woman, she actively reinforces power structures that harm and disenfranchise women, beginning in the voting booth. The concept of complicity has taken on fresh urgency in the era of the Trump administration, which is itself closely associated with women described as being complicit. When discussing complicity, the 53% of white women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election (CNN) is a frequently-cited figure— though it is lower than the percentage of white women who supported Republican candidates in previous elections (Simmons). Women employed in Trump’s administration are also often described as being complicit in the administration’s efforts to shore up a distinctly white patriarchy at the expense of women, minoritized communities , and the socioeconomically marginalized and disenfranchised. The association between women either affiliated with or who support the Trump administration has especially been emphasized in popular culture, with television shows like Saturday Night Live frequently lampooning public figures including Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and, perhaps most memorably, Ivanka Trump. Trump was parodied by actress Scarlett Johannson in a perfume ad sketch for a fictional fragrance called Complicit, “for the woman who could stop all of this…but won’t” (Johannson). The sketch went viral, amassing nearly ten million views on YouTube alone. THE HANDMAID’S TALE Complicity, and the role that women play in protecting the social, cultural, and political institutions that put them at a disadvantage, has become a much more frequent topic of discussion since 2016. While it has been particularly reflected in television in both comedy and drama, it is in dramatic television where the vestiges of the Cool Girl are visible in the more dangerous and vulnerable complicit woman. In shows like Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale—an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel that imagines the total disempowerment of women with startling swiftness and alacrity after a revolution carried out by religious zealots—it is made clear how essential complicit women are to the continuity of Gilead’s oppressive regime. The social structure of women in Gilead is caste-like, and while some women are treated much, much more violently than others, all are oppressed and wholly disempowered. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy 39 Watson The idea that no woman is safe is emphasized in the second season finale when Serena-Joy Waterford, the wife of Commander Frederick Waterford and herself an architect of Gilead, is severely punished with the amputation of a finger after arguing that women should be taught to read and then reading aloud a passage from the Bible that supports her beliefs (The Word).